Service levels must stay up after the Cup

Businesses that encourage their employees to LOL will be laughing all the way to the bank.

The Wedding Guy's Peter Duncan, two time winner of the Trust Power customer service category of the Westpac Rotorua Business Excellence Awards, says LOL means much more than the text abbreviation for Laughing Out Loud.

"It stands for Love, Own and Lead. You need to love what you do and be passionate about it. You need to take ownership of building customer relationships. You need to lead within your own organisation."

Duncan has been working with a range of local businesses to spread his customer service message and success, saying more consistent, cohesive service levels will benefit everybody in the city.

"We can't pull out all the stops during the Rugby World Cup and then just return to mediocre. It is so important to keep that standard up."

The first step is delivering a great customer service experience for each client and the second is to make the transition from a one-off transaction to an ongoing business relationship.

He told The Daily Post relationship building was the key to changing a positive customer experience into dollars in hand.

"If a client has a great experience, they will return to the business and tell 10 friends. If only one of those friends becomes a new client, that's a 100 per cent return on that relationship."

The 2011 Westpac Rotorua Business Excellence Awards are this Friday and Duncan has been working with finalists. He said winning the customer service award in 2009 and 2010 had been excellent for his own business and it positive talking to other businesses with such a strong customer service focus.

"It is great seeing these businesses achieving excellence benchmarks, but they are the minority rather than the majority. Customer service excellence is a clear point of difference in the market."

This point of difference is something he looks for when inviting businesses to partner with The Wedding Guy, which works with wedding-related business such as local florists, venues, caterers and photographers to create wedding packages for clients.

Duncan said New Zealand's complaint culture needed to be "turned around".

"If a Kiwi has a bad experience, they won't say anything at the time, but then they will call 10 people and tell them about it. Complaints need to be seen as constructive feedback."

He said customers needed to be more honest if they expected service levels to improve and business owners and employees needed to be less defensive about negative feedback, make the client feel as if they have listened and then use the criticism to do better next time.

"This is becoming even more important in these days of social networking, which can create or destroy your business."

Duncan said negative comments on social media and consumer ratings sites such as Trip Advisor needed to be dealt with immediately and positively to turn potentially damaging publicity into a positive outcome for that customer and everybody else following the exchange.